4.3 Looking for Raid Exploits Lead to Multiple Bans in Top Guilds

When 4.3 hit last week, the Looking for Raid feature brought joy to many pugs and now it's also now bringing misery to quite a few hardcore guilds. As it turns out, there was a loot bug with the LFR system and master looting. Instead of reporting them, however, most people chose to exploit it to keep their competitive edges. Members of many top guilds in the world such as Paragon and Method queued up multiple times through a loophole that allowed players to get loot for more than one run in a row. While LFR is supposed to limit players to be eligible for loot only their first run through, regardless of whether they loot or not, this loophole allowed them to farm for early tier 13 bonuses to give them that extra boost in PvE content.

The end result? Many players opened their emails to find themselves with an 8 day ban, just in time for the holidays--and progression farming. Heroics unlock this Tuesday and this was going to be the last epic push for progression hardcore raiders before Mists of Pandaria. Now many of these guilds now have entire rosters banned, along with their new gear removed. If the bans stick, this should greatly affect world rankings this tier.

So what do you think? Did they get what they deserved--or is an 8 day ban a little too severe for some 384 ilevel loot? Did you exploit or do you know anyone who did?

There has been a lot of misinformation going around, so to clear things up, here is a truthful account of what exactly happened with the LFR and what we have to say about it:

The patch hit EU servers on Wednesday. We started off with our 5x Firelands runs to wrap up legendaries and called it a night. For Thursday, we had an elaborate plan to run a personal LFR raid for every main character to get the maximum amount of loot.

As we were doing the first few runs, we noticed an unrealistic amount of tier pieces on some guilds' armory profiles, which we thought was unattainable through normal means. We started looking into it, and found out that you can loot passed loot on bosses, regardless of save status, if you zone out and back into the instance. This did not provide the raid with any extra loot, but it did eliminate a major portion of the RNG that would have been involved in simply doing personal runs for everyone.

We acknowledge that using this unintended behavior, which was quite clearly a bug, to our gain, was wrong. The fact that others were using it as well is no justification for doing it ourselves. We apologize for doing it, and accept whatever consequences follow.

Comments

Comment by Ashelia

on 2011-12-05T23:09:07-06:00

You exploit to get ahead in the game is a form of cheating. People who did it should get banned. You would think the top guilds would know better than to take part in this. Hasnt past exploits taught these guilds lessons?.

It has taught them that sometimes blizzard hands out bans and sometimes they do nothing. So to stay ahead of the competition many raiders feel forced to exploit because this might not be something blizzard considers as serious.

Pretty much what Somaru said. As a hardcore raider, the general vibe is that if Paragon and co had do it (which they did), a top world guild is sorely tempted to also do it in order to keep their rank. I mean, if no one got any bans from the other guilds and you DIDN'T do it, you could lose a lot of ranking by not participating due to a disadvantage in gear =/

For what it's worth, my guild is a top 20 and we were considering doing this for a while but ended up not doing it. So I definitely get the temptation.

Comment by frenchyfries

Comment by ittybittylily

on 2011-12-05T23:10:04-06:00

This was definitely deserved. An 8 day ban is extremely lenient.

Comment by SattyTheCzar

on 2011-12-05T23:10:10-06:00

If blizz would think things through they maybe wouldn't have to worry about it, Its 384 gear, and the knowledge they have of fights is just going to put them at the top, blizz just gave other terrible guilds a chance to catch up.

Comment by dragonstomp

on 2011-12-05T23:11:17-06:00

The Tol Barad bridge would like to have a word with Blizzard.

Comment by angelf1107

on 2011-12-05T23:11:19-06:00

I agree with this statement!

Comment by FartGarfunkel

on 2011-12-05T23:11:35-06:00

they should consider a career in politics, i'm not buying it

Comment by AkimboYojimbo

on 2011-12-05T23:11:45-06:00

Without a doubt, this was most definitely deserved. Any tolerance for this kind of exploitation just leads to more of the same. No I don't raid due to a limited schedule and low population on my faction, and I don't know anyone personally who is currently active but I would be even more vehement if I did.

Comment by Sas148

on 2011-12-05T23:14:47-06:00

About time they show some force for taking advantage of exploits.

Comment by JERthe3rd

Comment by TheSunthorn

on 2011-12-05T23:15:46-06:00

I wish I could up-vote this comment, because I would love to see something like this. I read a lot of comments from people who were basically exploitation apologists, saying that top raiding guilds "had to" cheat in order to stay ahead and get server firsts. I remember this happening before and Paragon was the guild who got world first because of -- Insidia? -- exploiting the Lich king fight with engineers gaming the platform dropaways. Banned out so you've got no change for world first and the title "the cheater" for a lengthy period sounds just.

There are always those strange folks who would go ahead and exploit in thee hopes of getting the title, but it takes all kinds to make the World...of Warcraft. Bless their hearts.

Comment by Irralis

Comment by seska

on 2011-12-05T23:19:15-06:00

all i see is a bunch of people hating on paragon cuz they can't even get close to as good as they are. ure happy someone gets banned because they were doing whatever they could to clear content. doesnt surprise me much from this retarded community.

Comment by Ashelia

I actually linked that one in the main post. I got a bunch of Real ID whispers when I logged in about friends of friends/guilds being banned, so I started writing this then googled to check out if it had been posted. So I gave them props ;)

Comment by frenchyfries

on 2011-12-05T23:20:17-06:00

The thing is Paragon and other top guilds probably have other accounts with chars almost just as geared. They will just raid on those guys for the week under the same guild name and get some firsts.

Comment by JERthe3rd

on 2011-12-05T23:21:07-06:00

all i see is a bunch of people hating on paragon cuz they can't even get close to as good as they are. ure happy someone gets banned because they were doing whatever they could to clear content. doesnt surprise me much from this retarded community.

Don't want to start anything here, but you might want to spell/grammar check before you post if you want to call someone "retarded." People aren't just hating on Paragon, they are hating on people who knowingly cheat.

Comment by Ashelia

on 2011-12-05T23:21:27-06:00

The thing is Paragon and other top guilds probably have other accounts with chars almost just as geared. They will just raid on those guys for the week under the same guild name and get some firsts.

You're assuming they didn't do that on their other characters, though. I'm not sure if they did. I know people whose guilds were banned who, yes, have some 391 alts (a lot of us do) but are still down a tank or a solid DPS because of this.

That said, it wouldn't hurt any of these guilds in the long run, as in the race for Deathwing, they will still get that before others--regardless of a week or two off.

Comment by seska

on 2011-12-05T23:23:15-06:00

all i see is a bunch of people hating on paragon cuz they can't even get close to as good as they are. ure happy someone gets banned because they were doing whatever they could to clear content. doesnt surprise me much from this retarded community.

Don't want to start anything here, but you might want to spell/grammar check before you post if you want to call someone "retarded." People aren't just hating on Paragon, they are hating on people who knowingly cheat.

dont care about spelling or grammar on the internet, im not writing an assignment as far as i know.

Comment by frenchyfries

on 2011-12-05T23:24:18-06:00

You're assuming they didn't do that on their other characters, though.

That is true. Guess we will see. If they were smart they wouldn't have. But if they were smart they wouldn't have exploited.